Climate Action

Tesla’s Master Plan Part Deux

In August of 2006, Elon Musk, Co-Founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, released his “Master Plan” for the company. The plan was simple, as he puts it: “Create a low volume car which would necessarily be expensive … use that money to develop a medium value car at a lower price … use that money to create an affordable, high volume car … provide solar power.” Nearly 10 years later, the business and technology magnate is ready to chart the company’s next steps into the future with a blog post titled “Master Plan, Part Deux” released earlier this week on the Tesla website.

This new master plan is based around some similar ideas: affordable electric cars, and solar energy, but with a plethora of technological twists that Musk hopes will help usher in a sustainable future for all. The first goal set in the plan is the integration of energy generation and storage systems. With his strong confidence in the upcoming vote on Tesla’s acquisition of energy services provider SolarCity, Musk believes that the time to bring together an “integrated and beautiful solar-roof” and the Tesla Powerwall home battery is now.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors Inc., unveils the company’s newest product, Powerpack in Hawthorne, Calif., Thursday, April 30, 2015.  (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)

As if bringing efficient, affordable, and accessible solar power to the world isn’t ambitious enough, it only gets better from there. The rest of the plan focuses on the company’s plans for their line of cars in the near future. In the wake of the recent announcement of the new Tesla Model 3, an affordable electric sports sedan coming in 2017, the company seeks to revolutionize the industry and address the needs of more global citizens than ever before. While the Tesla line currently has two offerings – the premium sedan Model S, and the SUV Model X – in the coming years they plan to release, along with the Model 3, a compact SUV, a pickup truck, a bus, and even an 18-wheeler.

With the plan for these vehicles comes an innovative suite of new technologies based around convenience, affordability, and sustainability. The two key areas for these technologies are autonomy and production. From buses that can match the speed of traffic to prevent congestion, to a car that can autonomously function as a ride sharing service when you’re not using it, the Tesla Autopilot “beta” has definitely got some hype to live up to. Combine that with highly-efficient Tesla automotive production super-center factories that conceptually could improve production as much as ten-fold, and you’ve got some a very bright and very cool future for Tesla and for the automotive industry as a whole.